Posts Tagged ‘bugis junction’

Miam Miam, a French-Japanese fine casual café kitchen, is a labour of love by globetrotting friends with a passion for food. Marrying French techniques with Japanese inspired flavours and ideologies, the team at Miam Miam is engineered to deliver a consistently excellent experience. The kitchen at Miam Miam subscribes to the Japanese ideologies of kaizen and kanban in its food and preparation practices. Kaizen refers to the practice of continuous improvement and kanban of a scheduling system that ensures lean and just-in-time production.

They’re not lying when they tell you that everything is “engineered to perfection”. For example, each portion of raw pasta measures exactly 110g. The pasta is cooked for exactly 7.5 minutes to achieve the perfect bite, aka pasta that is al dente. And in order to achieve the freshness that they so desire, everything is made to order. So…. be prepared to wait a little longer than what you would be used to for other restaurants!

Like this:

Had a nice lunch at Itacho Sushi Restaurant a few days ago with an ex-colleague. It was only my second visit to Itacho. I know that a number of people swear by Itacho, but my first visit to Itacho roughly a year ago was nothing memorable. Apart from the quality of the food, one of the reasons why people like going to Itacho is because of the seemingly cheaper price. That’s true, some items really are ridiculously cheap. But you couldn’t make a meal out of those items because the restaurant limits you to like 2 pieces per person. So invariably, one has to order some stuff from the main menu eventually, and the prices add up.

Having said that, eating at Itacho isn’t expensive (even if it is not super cheap), they have a huge range of sushi and quite a number of sushi items in the menu aren’t available in other restaurants like Sushi Tei, so it makes for an interesting experience.

Smoked Duck Croquette Ball, 2 for $3.70 U.P $7

The croquette ball was extremely delicious. It was piping hot when it arrived, and had such a crisp exterior, while delivering a luxuriously creamy filling when bitten into. On hindsight, I don’t think the smoked duck flavour was very strong, which is a little disappointing considering the price and the size.

I’ve eaten at Bishamon several times, mainly due to convenience’s sake. It isn’t the type of place I would actively mark down in my oh so packed schedule as a place to revisit on x date, if you know what I mean. It seems that they have also recently made changes to their menu.

Previously, you could order mini salads, such as sashimi and avocado salad for about $4.80, which I thought was a good price. Coupled with their mini sized ramen portions, the amount of food just filled the gap. It now seems that their new menu has done away with the mini sized salads. The full-sized sashimi salad now costs about $8.50.

The mini ramen portions are still available at about $8. I think this is the perfect sized portion if you want to still be able to try their side dishes.

Ordering ramen can be quite confusing if you don’t know the terminology. The pictures show similar looking bowls of noodles. A friend once told me how to unlock the mystery, which I will attempt to address here. It seems the main difference between all of them is in how the stock is prepared. There is chicken stock, pork stock and chicken and pork stock. For each of these, you can then continue to choose if you want a salt flavour (shio), soya sauce flavour (shoyu) or miso flavour (miso). These are the main choices but each restaurant may obviously try to impart their own uniqueness to the broth. You are on your own there.

All I know is that I like the Tonkotsu stock with miso, which in my opinion gives the most impactful flavour. Miso sounds mild, especially when you associate it with the mild miso soup. For some reason, this is not so in the context of ramen broths.

I ordered the Mini Sapporo Tonkotsu Ramen – $7.80. I think the broth is quite flavourful. You can taste the flavours of the simmered ingredients in the broth. So many other places serve ramen broth that just tastes like salty water. The noodles are also bouncy, similar to the texture of wanton mee, which is exactly how I like it. Still, as mentioned previously, my favourite ramen restaurants are Marutama Ramen and Ippudo.

Bishamon also uses the chewy type of ramen for some of its other dishes, so if you don’t like those, be sure to order the Sapporo Tonkotsu Ramen, or ask the waiter if it is possible to get the bouncy noodles instead.

And because I ordered the mini sized ramen, I still had space to indulge in a bowl of agedashi tofu ($4.20 if I recall correctly)